Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA): A Complete Guide

The ecommerce marketing landscape has begun to evolve into a complex web. Keywords, emails, and pop-ups might get the job done, but they are not enough anymore. The time to take action is now. 

The key is to curate your content for your audiences. Helping your audiences see the products they’ve previously liked can unlock the door to success for your business. 

Using remarketing lists for search ads is the best way to achieve this. Remarketing lists can serve as a powerful tool for PPC marketers, helping merchants complete the funnel and turn targeted advertising into their forte. 

This blog will guide you through the details of how remarketing lists for search ads (RSLA) function, how they can be different from traditional search ads, how you can set it up on your Google account, and give you the best practices used in remarketing lists for Google ads. 

Let’s begin. 

What Are Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)?

Imagine that you’ve been looking at a product on a website. Hours later, you get shown the ad for the exact same product that you were looking at. This will significantly increase the chances of you buying that product. These ads are curated specially for different customers based on the products they view. 

Google allows merchants to add potential customers who have previously visited their website to be retargeted for customized ads. This retargeting is done using remarketing lists, which allow you to display customized search ad listings to your target audience. 

Using remarketing lists for search ads can increase ROI by improving conversion rates, brand awareness, and customer loyalty. 

When Should You Use Remarketing Lists for Search Ads? 

Remarketing Lists for search ads can bring in increased profits in tumultuous times. Since these lists target visitors that have already engaged in some way with your website, it is easier to get them to convert. 

If your website is not performing well, or if you are experiencing issues with high clicks and no conversions, remarketing can be an effective way to combat these problems.

Understanding Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

How RLSA Works

Using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) can benefit merchants with businesses of all sizes. It can cultivate brand awareness and serve as a gentle reminder for potential customers who have exited the website before they made a successful purchase. 

The question that remains: how exactly do these remarketing lists work?

1. A customer visits your website, browses through your products, and leaves without making a purchase. 
2. Google records this behavior, adding this particular customer to the remarketing list. 
3. Google utilizes this remarketing list to showcase specialized products to customers through search ads. 

In other words, customized ads will only be displayed to audiences that have previously visited your website.  

Technical overview

Now that the basic application of remarketing lists is clear let’s examine their technical aspects. 

Before we get to the heart of the matter, here are two terms you should be familiar with: 

1. Cookies: Unlike the traditional baked cookie, online cookies allow a browser to track, analyze, and record user behavior. Cookies can track details like your preferred language or the items you added to your shopping cart on a website. 
2. Google’s Analytics Tag: It is a code snippet embedded within your website’s code. It was created especially for advertisers and can help you measure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and website analytics. 

If you install the Google tag on your website, you can easily send data from your website and ads to Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager, and other Google-related platforms. 

A basic understanding of these terms is necessary to understand how remarketing lists work. 

Using the Google Analytics Tag, you can collect data and create sophisticated lists for audiences that have previously visited your website. 

You can use the data collected from Google Analytics to narrow down the criteria for the people you want to target. 

Once the remarketing list is ready, Google uses advertising cookies to create an association between your website and the user cookies. Finally, when customers look for similar keywords, Google syncs data from your remarketing list and displays highly relevant ads to your target customers.

RLSA Audiences

Audiences in the remarketing lists are based on the categories and parameters you set in your Google Tag. Creating specific categories on your Google tag will help analyze and leverage customers with purchase intent, enhancing the remarketing campaign strategies and making your advertisements more data-driven.

Are Remarketing Lists For Search Ads Different From Traditional Display Remarketing?

Yes.

Traditional display remarketing is similar to remarketing lists for search ads, but it is not the same. It will show ads to users who have previously visited the advertiser’s website, considering that people who’ve already shown interest in your products are more likely to convert.

Both methods use cookies to track user behavior on their website.

Here’s where they are different,

• RLSAs will not automatically appear on a user’s search results just because they are in the remarketing list. They will only be triggered when the user searches for the keyword the advertiser has bid upon. This gives the advertiser more control over who gets these ads.
• Additionally, using RLSAs can decrease the overall cost of advertising since ads are only shown to people who have shown interest in the product and have searched for the same query again with the intent of purchasing.
• This is in contrast to traditional remarketing, where users are shown ads regardless of them showing intent or searching for similar keywords.

How To Create RLSA Campaigns

Creating Remarketing Lists

Now that you understand how remarketing lists function and can be utilized for efficient targeting let’s examine how to set up a remarketing list for your website.

If you’re using a Performance Max campaign for your Google Ads, you might want to utilize Audience Signals. They work similarly to RLSAs and guide Pmax’s algorithm towards the audiences you want to target.

Remarketing lists can be created on Search Ads 360 or on a Google Ads account and then synced to Search Ads 360. However, remarketing lists created on Google ads cannot be managed on Search Ads 360.

On Google Ads, you must create an audience segment for users who have visited your website before.

💡Before creating audiences for your account, ensure that you have successfully installed a Google tag on your website. Additionally, you must ensure that you have successfully linked your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. You can check if your Google Ads account is linked to your Google Analytics account: locate ‘Admin’> ‘Linked Accounts’ tab. Once you click on it, your screen will show you all the accounts linked to your Google Ads account.

To create an audience list for people who have visited your website previously, follow these steps:

Step #1 Log in to your Google Ads account. On the left-hand navigation panel, locate the ‘Tools ⚒️’ tab.

Step #2 Under ‘Shared Library,’ scroll down to the audience manager and click on +. In the dropdown menu, select ‘Website Visitors.’

Step #3 The next step is to name your audience segment. The ‘Segment Members’ option will be prefilled with ‘Visitors of web pages’. Scroll down to build the set of rules for your segment. You can include multiple actions and select actions that you wish to exclude.

To gain deeper knowledge about rules you can set up, Google has a help article that can be useful.

For our list, we have chosen ‘Products’ as action.

Step #4 In the exclusion box, open the dropdown menu to select ‘Conversions’. We want to exclude customers who have already bought products from your website.

Step #5 Based on your preference, select the pre-fill option. Keep the membership status as ‘Open.’ Finally, click save. A new audience list will appear on your page.

Now that you have successfully created an audience list, you can use the data from this list to retarget customers in your search ad campaigns.

Integrating Remarketing Lists with Search Ad Campaigns

To utilize a remarketing list for your search ad campaign, Google requires that your audience segment have more than 1000 cookies (visitors) in order to retarget customers using a search ad campaign.

Additionally, the maximum time a visitor can be remarketed to is 540 days.

Follow these instructions to link remarketing lists to search ad campaigns:

Step 1. Log in to your Google Ads account, and on the left side panel, click on

‘Campaigns 📢’. Select ‘Audiences, keywords, and content’ from the list and scroll down to locate ‘Audiences.’

Step 2. Next, scroll down to locate the ‘Edit Audience Segments’ button. Click on it.

Step 3. A dropdown menu will appear. Here you can select ‘Ad Group’

Step 4. A pop-up window will appear. Here, you can select your preferred campaign and ad group to which you want to add your audience.

Step 5. Once you select your preferred campaign and ad group, another pop-up will appear titled ‘Edit Audience Segments.’ Instead of opting for ‘targeting’ right at the beginning, it is advisable to select ‘observation.’ and under it, Next, click on ‘Browse.’

Targeting will only show your ads to the people in the audience segment. Observation will show your ads to everyone but more to people that are in your audience segment. It is better to choose observation in the start and then opt for targeting.

Step 6. Scroll down for ‘How they have interacted with your business’.

Step 7. Here, you will find your audience. Select your audience and click on Save.

And that’s it!

💡Psst! When updating your campaign’s audience segment, don’t forget to adjust the bidding strategy for the keywords you’re targeting. Bid adjustments allow you to control the frequency at which your ads are shown to users. You can also control when, where and what devices you show your ads upon. You can also use the ‘Smart Bidding’ feature by Google to enhance auction-time bids.

Best Practices For Effective RLSA Campaigns

Tailoring Ad Messages to Returning Users

RLSA’s biggest benefit is that the ads can be customized, especially for returning users, based on their actions on your website. You can include a line saying ‘10% off on your next purchase’ or similar offers. If a user has visited your website long ago, you can remind them of the products with the words ‘Miss you’ or ‘Waiting to see you again.’

It is advisable to test this on smaller audiences and try different messages before you begin to test it on larger audiences.

Broaden Keywords

Broadening the keywords that you target is an effective way to ensure that your ads show up for highly convertible users.

Broader keywords would ordinarily be difficult to rank for. But because you have a specific audience specifically tailored to your campaign, your ads will appear higher for them, especially when they search for broader terms.

A company utilized remarketing lists for search ads to increase their conversion rate by +300% and ROI by 30%.

How?

Their remarketing list allowed them to target broader keywords for people who had already purchased something from the company a year ago during the holiday season! Their ads were shown to people who had already liked their companies’ goods during the holiday season.

If you decide to proceed with this approach, remember that using only broad keywords might make ranking difficult. You must balance your business-focused keywords and broad keywords related to your industry.

Optimizing Bids and Budgets

Optimizing your bids and budgets can significantly impact the performance of your ad campaigns. Here are a few tricks for generating higher conversions and clicks.

• Bid on competitor names when the user has already visited your site: Bidding on competitor names can be an extremely useful technique if your target audience has already visited your site. It basically implies that your target audience has significantly progressed in the purchasing funnel. Showing them the products they previously liked can be the key to a successful conversion.
• Adjust bids based on audience value: If you realize that your website receives more conversions around certain periods of time, try to bid higher during and before that period. Additionally, you must ensure that you curate your ads and bids based on how users have interacted with your website. For example, someone that has added products to the cart will have higher value than someone who simply visited your home page.

A/B Testing and Experimentation

A/B testing involves testing different ad groups, campaign goals, including and excluding different parameters in your audience lists, etc. Running an A/B test means trying similar marketing campaigns with slight customizations to estimate, which once helps you meet your goals better.

While conducting an A/B testing campaign, you can even target users at different stages in the purchasing funnel to check which ads and text customizations offer increased website conversions. Most audiences will be in the ‘Action’ stage of the purchasing funnel. Since they have previously visited your website, they are a lot closer to converting than an average user.

💡Tip: You can also combine RLSAs with Dynamic Remarketing Ads to achieve better results.

Key Metrics for RLSA Performance

After you optimize your bids and curate and tailor your strategy to your fit, it is equally important to measure the performance of your RLSA ads. While you measure the success of your remarketing lists for search ads campaigns, you must keep these key indicators in mind:

• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Conversion rates
• ROI
• Cost-per-click (CPC)

These metrics can help you measure the revenue each click brings in. You can check these metrics on your Google Ads account.

On your Google Ads account, navigate to the left-side navigation panel.

Here, click on ‘Campaigns 📢’ and locate ‘Overview.’

Advertisers place severe emphasis on these key metrics to measure ad success. As a merchant, analysis of these metrics can also help you predict the success of your future campaigns and determine the areas where you need to improve.

Upselling with RLSA

You can leverage upselling for products that you wouldn’t normally advertise for. Say you sell shoes on your website. You can advertise shoe-cleaning products or bundles for users who have already liked and bought your shoes.

Upselling means urging customers to buy additional products. This tactic can lower the ad spend for products you don’t wish to spend a lot on and increase the chances of conversion.

You might also like to read: How to improve Google Ads Quality Score – Easy Solution

Conclusion

Remarketing lists for search ads can be extremely beneficial to your store. As a merchant, keeping up with evolving trends in the world of ecommerce advertising is not only advised but also necessary.

We hope this guide was helpful in knowing about, setting up and optimizing the use of remarketing lists for search ads.

FAQs

1. What are Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)?

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads is a feature by Google Ads that allows merchants to showcase customized ads to customers who have previously visited their website. These ads can be tailored to adequately respond to the customer’s action on the website. Using RLSAs can greatly increase the likelihood of conversion by targeting more qualified leads.

2. How do I set up RLSA for my website?

To set up RLSA, you must install the Google Tag on all pages of your website. This Google tag will collect information about actions taken by users on your website and sync this data with Google’s marketing platforms.

On Google Ads, you can create audience segments(remarketing lists) and utilize them to curate marketing campaigns.

3. What are the benefits of using RLSA?

RLSAs can be greatly beneficial to merchants as it allows them to re-engage previous visitors, target pre-qualified leads and optimize ad spend by narrowing down the audiences that are more likely to convert. Additionally, merchants can utilize best practices such as adjusting bids according to audience value to take complete advantage of RLSAs.

4. Can I exclude certain users from my RLSA campaigns?

Yes. While creating the audience segment, you can choose to exclude certain audiences. Excluding audiences can be useful for merchants that sell once-in-a-lifetime products or services.

5. How can I use RLSA to bid on competitor keywords?

RLSAs help narrow down your audience by targeting those audiences that have previously visited your website. Combining RLSAs with bidding on competitor keywords will help audiences keep your brand in mind when comparing their options. This increases the chances of a conversion without increasing the ad spend.

6. What types of audience segments can I create with RLSA?

You can set custom parameters on your Google tag to record activity of the audiences you want to target. The audience segments you can create based on user behavior include recording visitors to specific pages, users who started but did not complete a purchase, users who visited during specific dates or events or you can even base segments based on the number of visits or time spent on your website.

7. What are some best practices for RLSA campaigns?

RLSA campaigns are highly efficient. They can be further upgraded if you understand your audience and create tailored ad messages based on where a user is in the purchasing funnel. You can leverage broader keywords and target competitor keywords, too.

8. Can you do retargeting with search ads?

Yes! RLSAs can help you retarget customers that have previously interacted with your website. A Google Tag placed on your website records how users interact with your site. This information is synced with Google platforms where you can create custom audience segments and use them in your ad groups and campaigns with search ads.

9. What is required for a remarketing list in Google Ads?

To create a remarketing list, you must first gather information from users that visit your website. You can place a Google Tag on your website and use cookies to collect and sync data with Google’s platforms. This data can be utilized to create a remarketing list on Google Ads.

Google requires you to have at least 1000 cookies before you create a remarketing list to protect customer’s privacy.